I reached out farther until I could feel Jitra.
What was left of Jitra. I could feel the wounds in the earth where the caved-out rock had broken, where heavy stone collapsed on yielding bodies. I pulled it off. I could feel the heartbeats where people were clustered together, holding one another tight, praying for safety.
And all that stood between them and my husband’s yellow powder were a few rocks in the pass.
I saw soldiers at the edge of my vision, through the rotating cloud of boulders that encircled me, and suddenly I knew what to do. The desert would not be at risk. The desert would not fall, and whatever treasures my people protected, Calix would never touch them.
A scream tore out of me as I reached for the land bridge. Breaking, snapping, tearing the rocks to pieces like a twig over my knee. My work was rough and crude, but all I wanted was to cut the desert off from the Bone Lands, to collapse the pass into the mountains it came from.
The land bridge broke in the center first, and with its support gone, the rocks began shearing off in huge, heavy boulders. My power clawed at them, crashing them down one after the other until the land bridge was nearly gone, a jagged mouth of teeth laughing at Calix’s audacity, his hate, his mortality.
My work faltered, and it took several seconds for me to feel the pain.
Something was burning in my shoulder, and my power was slipping from my hands. I twisted, looking at my shoulder to see the shaft of an arrow sticking out strangely behind me.
My flying boulders tumbled down into the crevasse, and a crack formed in the ground near my feet. The moving dirt and rocks wobbled in their pattern, flying out, evading my grasp.
My knees went weak, and I fell, and suddenly all the rocks dropped to the ground with me. It was then that I saw the blood Kairos must have seen, seeping down my skirts.
My baby. My daughter.
A new scream came out of me, frightened and trembling and wild, shaking my lungs and my hands and my skin. Then I saw boots striding toward me, and then another set.
I looked up and saw my husband, still a distance away while his soldiers closed in on me.
My hands trembled and I realized, He knows.
The soldiers grabbed me and pulled me up, and I thrashed against their hands. Their grips didn’t even tighten as I fought, and I realized I could barely control my limbs. I had nothing left.
I cast around, searching for Kairos in the clouds of dust. I heard Osmost shrieking over the shouts of the soldiers, but I couldn’t see my brother.
“Kai!” I screamed. “Kai! Kai!”
I heard a roar, and I looked over to see Zeph fighting off at least seven of Calix’s men. I couldn’t see Theron. Zeph drove his elbow into the face of one man, and the guard dropped so fast I wondered if Zeph had killed him. Galen jumped in between them, tackling Zeph down to the ground. Zeph fought him, but it wasn’t like he fought the guards. Galen said something to him, and my big protector stopped.
Both men looked at me, and I shook my head. “Help me!” I screamed. “Please, help me!”
Galen’s eyes met mine for a long moment. He was filthy, his handsome face covered in dirt and dust, making his green eyes stand out more. He looked devastated.
But he wasn’t moving. He kept Zeph pinned, and even Zeph had stopped fighting. Galen never moved. He didn’t even have the decency to turn his face from mine.
“You coward!” I shrieked. “You damned coward!”
A hand struck my cheek, and I turned forward to see my husband. He grabbed my chin. “Did you really think that my own brother would betray me?” he snapped. “For you?” His words were so forceful that spittle landed on my face. I flinched, but his fingers were gripping me too hard to move. “I swear to the Three-Faced God,” he growled at me, “if our child still lives, I will tear it out of you, and then I will wipe your existence from this earth. Never will a queen of the Trifectate be a filthy sorceress.”
Calix pointed to a carriage, and my heart seized. He wouldn’t take me back to the City of Three. If I went into that carriage, I would never leave his grasp alive—I was sure of it.
I called for my power, waiting for the threads to curl around my hands as the men pushed me farther. I made my hands into fists, bursting the pain from the arrow in my shoulder. I shook my fingers out.
Nothing.
I remembered Kata’s advice, and I tried to call up my memories of Gavan rubbing his face into my stomach.
Gavan’s tiny arm covered in blood and dirt.
Catryn, not far from him, twisted and broken.
My baby. My baby. My baby.
The guards shoved me into the carriage and brought rope to tie me to the floor. I curled around my knees.
I had no power left.
Missing
By the time they pulled me from the carriage, it had been long enough that my body disdained the movement. My skin was thick with dirt; blood crusted in places that made it feel like I was tearing a new wound open when I moved. It felt like the arrowhead shot into my shoulder hadn’t been removed, even though they snapped the shaft off. Every muscle ached and cried, and I could hardly stand on my own two feet. Long enough in the carriage, long enough with my despair, and my feet almost failed me.
It was a whole new heartbreak when my body was already crowded with others.
I knew by the smell of the air that we were near the mountains. We were on a narrow path covered by dense forest, and in front of us a sheer rock face loomed with a small door in it. The door opened, and torchlight flickered, the only light I had to see by.
A single guard took me now, carrying me in his arms. I curled my fingers, searching for the threads, but they were still gone.
Without a way to fight back, I let myself be carried.
He took me into a long hallway that burrowed neatly into the rock. I couldn’t tell how long he walked; all that caught my gaze were the moving, jumping shadows of the light on the ceiling of the tunnel.
I heard metal clinking and moving, a low, dark sound somewhere ahead.
A high-pitched scream rang out, strangled and disembodied, sliding over the walls like a ghost. The guard’s hands tightened on me, but he didn’t stop or show any other reaction.
The tunnel widened, and the jumping shadows on the ceiling receded from me.
“There,” I heard Calix say. The guard turned and moved into an open room. The rock here was gray, not like the warm red of Jitra, and the light on it made everything look wet and slick. There was a huge stone altar in the center of the round room, hooks hanging above it with lanterns swinging, illuminating the girl who was lying on top of it.
She wore a dirty dress that might have been blue to start with, and part of her hair was cut off, revealing wounds that had been stitched up on her head. One arm was splayed out, and her skin was an indecipherable mass of bruising, blood, and cuts. Blood puddled beneath her on the ground.
I stopped looking at her long enough to notice six or more doors around the circle where the girl was.
One guard strode ahead of us to open a door directly behind the girl’s head, and the guard holding me walked in and put me gently down on a hard bench with a pillow and a thin, small blanket.
“Get the quaesitori,” Calix said, standing in the doorway.
The guard left without a word, and I didn’t move, glancing at Calix before staring at the wall.
“Comfortable?” Calix snarled.
I shifted my hips a little, but it hurt, and I stopped moving.
“You’re going to die in here,” Calix told me. “But not before I discover all your secrets. You are the first sorceress who can command the earth that I’ve ever seen. And before you die, I will know everything there is to know.”
“You are your own end,” I whispered. “You have struck out against the desert. Against your queen. Your people will revolt, and they will unseat you. They will kill you.”
“Really?” he snarled. “They never seemed to mind before.”
I st
ared at the wall. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he wanted to tell me. He wanted to gloat about his sick deeds, and I wouldn’t play into such desires, even now, when I had nothing.
“My king,” someone murmured, and Calix stepped aside. A man in black robes came into the room, and his eyes swept over me, slow and assessing. “I will examine her, my king.”
“I’ll stay,” Calix said, not leaving the open doorway.
“My queen,” the man said, dragging a stool to the bed. “Could you lie on your back?”
“If you think I’ll let you touch me, you’re mad,” I snapped.
“I mean only to see if your baby is alive,” he said. “I’ve been well trained in such arts.”
My body shook, but that if—if my baby was alive—made me put aside my fears and indignity. I lay flat on my back, and he put his hands under my skirt. I wanted to shut my eyes, but instead I looked at Calix, tears coming out of my eyes as the man told me my body had ruptured and the baby couldn’t survive like that. When he took his hands away, I shut my eyes, curling toward the wall.
“Very well,” Calix said. “Dress her shoulder. Feed her something. She will need her strength for later.”
I shut my eyes and must have slept for a while, but it never felt like sleep. It felt just like being awake, the same numbness, the same pain, only that I was in darkness.
But I woke with a start, jumping to the door. There was a tiny grate that was too high for me to see out of, but I could hear a girl—the same girl? I had no way of knowing—wailing in pain.
“Again, Dara!” I heard a male voice yell. She cried out again, and it trailed off into piteous sobs. Dara. The girl from the ship on the communes, the girl whom my husband promised to try fairly. A girl he’d clearly been experimenting on for as long as he promised me he hadn’t.
“Again!” The answering scream was different, more raw, like she had reached a new level of pain.
“Again!”
I fell back from the door as, instead of a scream, a ball of fire rose up in the chamber, blazing fast and extinguishing.
“Write that down,” I heard a man murmur.
I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. The screams ended not long after that, but there were still grunts, shuffles, noises that haunted me.
Six doors, at least. I wondered how many of us he had to torture. I wondered where my brothers were, mourning without me. I wondered if anyone was able to burn the bodies of my family so they could return to the Skies.
I wondered how I was supposed to return a child to the Skies when there was nothing to burn.
Hours later, a guard opened my door. “Come,” he said, and gave me a cloth and a chip of soap. There were other women coming out of their cells, and one young man who, for a wild moment, I thought was my brother Aiden.
It wasn’t, of course. I would never see Aiden’s face again, and imagining him into this hell didn’t change that.
The guards led us deeper into the rock. I heard the rushing water before I saw it, and they led us into an underground river. The others didn’t need to be told what to do. They took off their clothes, putting them in neat piles, and waded into the water.
Slowly, I followed their example, glancing at their bodies without trying to be rude. I saw scars before I could really look at faces; long, thin lines from a whip, or maybe a knife. Long, deep wounds that were crusted with blood. Missing hair, missing fingers, missing eyes.
My skin could barely feel the cold as I stepped into the water. The river was moving fast enough that it plucked painfully at the things crusted to my skin, peeling the day before away without my consent.
“You’re the queen,” one said, looking at me. She was small, everything about her tiny, with dark hair that was long and knotted. She covered herself up, like suddenly this made our nudity inappropriate. “What—what are you—you’re the queen,” she said again.
A taller, older woman touched the girl’s shoulder, and I saw her hand was missing two fingers, raw red stumps where they used to be. “And just the same as us, it seems. I’m Iona,” she said softly to me.
“Shalia,” I murmured.
She nodded grimly. “Do you have the natural powers?” she asked.
I nodded. “Earth,” I told her. “You?”
She swallowed. “Water,” she said, running her hands into the river.
“You haven’t healed yourself ?” I whispered, looking at her hand.
The younger girl looked up at Iona, and Iona looked confused. “Heal?” she breathed.
“I know someone with your power,” I said. “She can heal people through it.”
“I’m not very strong,” she said, shaking her head.
“Wash!” the guards bellowed at us.
The women flinched, turning to scrape their bodies with the soap. The young man was already finished, climbing out of the water to take his cloth and dry off, then slowly put his clothes on. He was ashen and weak.
I scrubbed slowly at the dirt, ash, dust, and blood that was all that remained of my family. The river took it, folding every little piece of horror into its waters until I had none left, until my body was frozen and clean. I didn’t want to be clean. I didn’t want to ever move on from the last moment when the world was safe, when my family was smiling, when my baby was alive.
Blood still wept out of my body, and the river stole it from me.
The Trail of Smoke
When they brought us back to the central chamber, the table in the middle was empty, and everyone else was pushed back into their rooms except for me.
Calix came from down a shadowed hallway. He took a breath and nodded to me.
“Bring her.”
I pulled back, but the guards grabbed me, dragging me forward as I fought and twisted and flailed. They brought chains out, and they shackled my wrists and yanked until I was on my feet, standing away from the table, unable to go far. I tugged against my bonds as my heart pounded, making every inch of me panic and hurt.
“Stop,” Calix growled, coming over to me.
I shook my head, sucking in breath too fast through my nose, the sound high and reedy.
“I won’t hurt you,” Calix told me.
I could hardly catch my breath, but I shouted, “You’re going to kill me!”
His throat worked. “Eventually. It doesn’t have to hurt. I don’t want to see you in pain. I just need you to show us your power, and I will end all this. Do you understand?”
Flexing my hands, reaching for my power, I shook my head. “It’s gone, Calix. I don’t have it anymore. I can’t feel it!”
He laughed, leaning closer to me. “I understand. I once thought that myself—there was even a girl I tested long, long ago who claimed she didn’t have powers. I believed her, and I didn’t test as hard as I should have. Since then, I know better. I’ve tested many people with your foul magic, and I can always, always make it present. It just takes a tremendous amount of persuasion.” His hand stroked my face. “I’ll help you show your power, I swear. And once we can study it properly, your death will be swift.”
I tried to kick him, and missed, and he sighed.
“I know I was angry yesterday, Shalia. You have always been able to make me lose my temper. But I truly don’t want you to suffer. It’s not necessary.”
“You killed my whole family,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “They posed a problem. I needed to shift the lake, and I needed you to know you couldn’t leave me. I know you were trying to. Do you deny it?”
“My family wanted me to run,” I told him. “And I hadn’t decided anything.”
“Does it matter?” he asked with a dry laugh. “You betrayed me. You deceived me. All that time, I told you what she did to me before. And you did the very same thing.”
Three quaesitori entered the room, setting up small tables with paper on them, sitting down.
“Now, I have a theory about you,” Calix said to me. “There are only two possibilities to get the power t
o respond to us. One is to have your body protect you in the event of your near death or tremendous pain.”
Skies protect me. Please—ancestors of mine that have returned to the Skies, returned to the earth, please protect me.
“But for you, I believe there is another option. This is to exploit your compassion, my love. You are soft hearted, and I have known this from the first. I believe you will be more positively motivated by the pain of others than pain you might experience yourself. Do you understand?”
The pain of others. I shook my head, vicious and fast. “Calix, please, I don’t—”
“Do you understand?” he asked.
My eyes skittered around to the doors.
“Shalia!” he roared.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and waved to the guards.
They brought the smallest girl out from her cell. She was shivering, staring at the table as they led her over to it. She didn’t fight as they strapped her down. “I can do it,” she said. “You saw me before. You don’t need to hurt me again; I can do it.”
Calix stayed back, across the room from me, while the quaesitori came forward. The one who had inspected my body touched her face gently. “You did well yesterday,” he told her, and this seemed to calm her a little. “Today you just get comfortable; we won’t hurt you this time.”
She seemed to believe this, and I watched Calix as he glanced down the darkened hall. He looked back to the quaesitori and nodded.
They finished tying her down, and one of them stroked a knife over the crook of her arm. She flinched, and blood flowed out instantly, collecting in a bowl beneath her.
“That’s it,” the quaesitor said gently. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
“Calix,” I called, my voice low.
He heard and walked over to me. “Care to show me something?” he asked, smiling.
“Leave her alone.”
She shifted on the table. She was looking at me, growing unsure.
“I have a purpose for her,” Calix said. “A dual purpose to motivate you. You don’t want her to die, do you?” he asked.
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